The GEO Group Stadium sounds like the sort of ballpark Escape From New York's Snake Plissken might stroll past. Photograph: Corbis

If you've been paying attention to the movies all these years, you will already be aware that the so-called society of the future will have dispensed with wars. Death games, however, will be big news. In whichever dystopia you and your children find yourselves after the Great Plot Device Wars, athletes will essentially be prisoners pitted against each other to make money for some kind of evil mega-corporation, or to distract the populace from the fact that they are effectively enslaved by said evil mega-corporation.

Every so often, scientists believe some sort of tear opens up in the spacetime continuum, causing part of this future to arrive in our present. And the other day, it seems, was one of those moments. How else to explain the fact that naming rights to a Florida football stadium have been sold to a private prison corporation? The 30,000-seat Florida Atlantic University stadium, home to the Florida Atlantic Owls, will now carry the name GEO Group Stadium, which is quite the firm to watch in the increasingly competitive arena of for-profit incarceration.

If that sounds to you like the sort of ballpark Snake Plissken might stroll past in the forthcoming movie Escape From The Premier League, you are strongly urged to get with the programme. Urged by GEO, that is, which is massively affronted that its move should be seen as anything other than straight-up philanthropy.

And yet, there are always the sneerers, as Tony Blair used to call them. "It's like calling something Blackwater Stadium," one prominent activist against private prisons told the New York Times, making reference to the private military contractor that has since rebranded to Academi after years of its activities being misunderstood in places from Afghanistan to Iraq to various CIA black sites. "This is a company whose record is marred by human rights abuses, by lawsuits, by unnecessary deaths of people in their custody and a whole series of incidents that really draw into question their ability to successfully manage a prison facility." A US judge described one GEO facility for teenaged prisoners as "a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions" and "a picture of such horror as should be unrealised anywhere in the civilised world".

But it's not only the activists and judges. The move has set marketing folks a-wonderin' why a firm like GEO has parted with $6m for the rights. After all, most stadium sponsors purchase these tie-ups in order to sell their product to the consumer – either the consumer who attends the stadium or the one watching at home. But GEO's "consumer" is effectively government – it angles for government contracts. Indeed, it is specifically angling for the spoils of a potential privatisation of Florida's state prisons. So either this is a typical attempt to affect consumer choice by reaching out to future criminals – because really, nothing says "Go Owls!" like choosing to commit your felony somewhere within the catchment of one of GEO's facilities. Or we've officially moved into the era where firms are openly co-opting sport to lobby government.

All this, of course, has happened in That America. But do assume that it could be replicated over here, and probably in a heartbeat. GEO already provides all kinds of private prison and detention services to the UK government, and runs immigration centres in Dungavel in Scotland and Harmondsworth in west London. (Just over a fortnight ago, an 84-year-old Canadian man who complained of heart pain while being detained was the seventh to die at Harmondsworth since 2001.) To visit the firm's website is to dive into a wonderland of euphemisms. It works in the "custody sector". Its facilities feature "leading-edge custodial technology".

Already, the days where the Reebok seemed a futuristically mercenary name for Bolton Wanderers' ground are long gone. The latest "new low" was the confirmation, a few months back, that cuddly payday loans firm Wonga would be sponsoring Newcastle. (Though its name adorns the club strip, the company insisted on restoring the name St James' Park to the Toon stadium, which I think we were supposed to think was classy.) Football's business brains seemed immensely relaxed about the whole deal, which was big of them, considering that exploiting people on low incomes is pretty much their job.

It all feels like just another chapter in big-time sport's increasingly arse-about-tit relationship with the communities it affects to serve. The ultimate illustration of that dysfunctional relationship, of course, came during Hurricane Katrina, and was summarised best by the radical US sportswriter Dave Zirin. A city which had failed to find money to maintain the levees meant to defend its poorest inhabitants had nonetheless always come up with the cash to construct and nurture the Superdome. Now people who could never have afforded a ticket at the stadium were herded into it for their very survival, with Jesse Jackson likening the rapidly-worsening conditions in the structure to the hull of a slave ship. Paraphrasing Chris Rock, Zirin pointed out that trickle-down economics does not always trickle down.

Ah well. Progress is the realisations of utopias, as someone who never got to take their seat in a private-prison-sponsored stadium once said. And let's face it, there'd be a neat narrative symmetry if, when the seemingly endless Olympic Stadium saga finally draws to a close, the naming rights were immediately sold to a certain private security firm by the name of G4S.